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President Donald Trump and the truth have grown more distant in recent months, according to a new analysis.

The Washington Post has been tracking the president’s false or misleading claims since he took office in January of last year.

In total he has averaged 6.5 false or misleading claims a day, but that the number of those claims has crept up since the beginning of his presidency. In the first 100 days of his administration, Trump averaged just 4.9 of those claims a day. In the last two months, that rate has almost doubled to 9 false or misleading claims a day, according to the Post. However, that number is bolstered by Trump’s rally in Michigan last week, where he lied 44 times during an 80-minute speech.

DONALD TRUMP IS LYING MORE NOW THAN HE WAS AT THE BEGINNING OF HIS PRESIDENCY

Trump's longtime personal lawyer/fixer Michael Cohen has now indicated that he intends to plead the Fifth Amendment in the civil case involving his hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, citing the fast-materializing criminal case stemming from that same payment.

"When you have your staff taking the Fifth Amendment, taking the Fifth so they are not prosecuted, when you have the man that set up the illegal server taking the Fifth, I think it is disgraceful." - Donald Trump.

“The mob takes the Fifth, If you're innocent, why are you taking the Fifth Amendment?” - Donald Trump

“Did you see her IT specialist? He's taken the Fifth,” Trump said. “The word is he's ratting her out like you wouldn't believe it.” - Donald Trump

"I am no fan of Bill Cosby but never-the-less some free advice - if you are innocent, do not remain silent. You look guilty as hell!" - Donald Trump

President Trump, in a stunning reversal, told a gathering of farm state lawmakers and governors on Thursday morning that he was directing his advisers to look into rejoining the multicountry trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal he pulled out of within days of assuming the presidency.

Trump Reverses Course and Proposes Rejoining Trans-Pacific Partnership

Reversing his veto threat, Trump signs the $1.3 Trillion dollar spending bill.

National Review says it's the Biggest Spending Increase Since 2009.

Trump briefly threatened to veto it. Mostly because it didn't spend enough: “... the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded,”

Spending wouldn't be such a problem except for the fact they also cut revenue by a over a $trillion with the tax bill.

I'm no mathematician but that seems to put a bit of crimp in his promise to eliminate the national debt in eight years.

Just in case we were wondering if arming teachers is a good idea:

As thousands of students walked out of their schools on Wednesday to pressure Congress to approve gun control legislation, three other students were healing from wounds inflicted when a teacher’s firearm accidentally discharged in a California classroom.

The teacher, Dennis Alexander, who is also a city councilman in Seaside, Calif., was showing the students a gun on Tuesday during his advanced public safety class at Seaside High School when the gun accidentally went off, Marci McFadden, a spokeswoman for the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

Across the country, another school was also investigating a weapon that discharged accidentally this week. The Alexandria Police Department in Virginia said that a school resource officer accidentally fired his gun inside his office at George Washington Middle School on Tuesday morning. Nobody was hurt, the police said.

Teacher’s Gun Is Accidentally Fired During Public Safety Class, Injuring 3

Rex Tillerson has been fired as Secretary of State; CIA director Mike Pompeo has been nominated to replace him. Donald Trump’s nominee to replace Pompeo at the CIA is Gina Haspel, who had been the agency’s deputy director.

In 2002, Haspel was present, in a supervising role, at a “black site” in Thailand where an individual named Abu Zubaydah—believed to be a top al-Qaida official—was tortured. Zubaydah was waterboarded, slammed against a wall, and confined in a “coffin-like” box. As ProPublica reported in 2017, though, “CIA analysts were wrong when they had identified Zubaydah as the number three or four in al-Qaida after Osama bin Laden. The waterboarding failed to elicit valuable intelligence not because he was holding back, but because he was not a member of al-Qaida, and had no knowledge of any plots against the United States.”

He remains imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay and, as the New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins has noted, lost his left eye at some point after being captured under circumstances that remain unclear.

When questions began to swirl about the Bush administration’s use of the “black sites,” and program of “enhanced interrogation,” [Haspel] began pushing to have the tapes destroyed. She accomplished her mission years later when she rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters and drafted an order to destroy the evidence, which was still locked in a CIA safe at the American embassy in Thailand. Her boss, the head of the agency’s counterterrorism center, signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a giant shredder.

Trump’s Nominee to Lead CIA Supervised Torture of Mistakenly Identified Subject, Then Destroyed Evidence

Holy crap, can you even imagine the response if Obama had proposed extrajudicial confiscation of guns?!

Trump: 'Take the guns first, go through due process second'

As of the latest reporting by the Treasury Department, the US gross national debt rose by $41.5 billion on Thursday, February 22, to a grand total of $20.8 trillion.

Here's the thing: On September 7, 2017, five-and-a-half months ago, just before Congress suspended the debt ceiling, the gross national debt stood at $19.8 trillion.

At that time, I was holding my breath waiting for the gross national debt to take a huge leap in a single day - as it always does after the debt ceiling gets lifted or suspended - and jump to the next ignominious level. It sure did the next day, when it jumped $318 billion.

And it continued. Over a period of 8 weeks, the gross national debt jumped by $640 billion. Four weeks after that, it had ballooned by $723 billion, at which point Fed Chair Yellen - whose cheap-money policies had enabled Congress to do this for years - said that she was "very worried about the sustainability of the US debt trajectory."

Then Congress served up another debt ceiling.

That debt ceiling was suspended on February 8, at which point the gross national debt began to surge again, adding $1 trillion ($960.4 billion rounded to the nearest 100 million), a 5% jump in the gross national debt in just 5.5 months

The US's national debt spiked $1 trillion in less than 6 months

Appearing in court today, former Trump campaign aide Rick Gates pled guilty to one count of conspiracy against the United States and one count of making false statements to the FBI and to the Special Counsel at a meeting last month. In preparation for the guilty plea, Robert Mueller filed superseding criminal information earlier today which alleged Gates and Manafort laundered tens of millions of dollars that they earned through their work for the Ukrainian government.

So that puts the Mueller Score at 5 guilty pleas and 19 indictments.

Rick Gates pleads guilty to conspiracy, lying to investigators

For those of you playing along at home that brings Mueller's score up to 4 guilty pleas and 15 indictments.

Mueller probe: London-based son-in-law of Russian businessman to plead guilty to false statements